Another step forward towards executive dominance in the EU? The role of national parliaments, social partners and subnational authorities in the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility

The literature on the governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) has primarily focused on studying the changes in authority patterns that the new instrument has implied for European socioeconomic governance, particularly with regards to the relationships between the EU and national decision-making levels. The article instead investigates the extent to which implementation of the RRF has altered institutional relationships among key institutional actors at the domestic level. Drawing on the literature on "executive dominance" (Curtin 2014) and executive federalism, and contrasting the theoretical expectations of these strands of scholarship with those of the experimentalist governance framework, the articles studies whether, and if so how, the implementation of the RRF has modified the pre-2020 European Semester and contributed to a threefold emigration of decision-making powers away from parliaments, social partners and subnational authorities towards the executive branch. In order to do so, the article takes as case studies the formulation and implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) in Italy, Germany, Belgium and Spain, four decentralised countries with very different federal arrangements. Within each case, it identifies and reconstructs the concrete social and economic policy areas that have been subject to competence disputes. Methodologically, the reconstruction is based on both document analysis and interviews with both EU and national-level officials involved in the implementation of the RRF. Overall, the article aims to shed light on the extent to which domestic factors mediate, or not, the top-down pressures towards executive dominance at the national level that a range of studies contend are implied in Europeanisation processes.